Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay Is Back Online
Many readers have submitted news that The Pirate Bay is back online, operating for now as "The Police Bay." Writes one anonymous submitter: "Pirate Bay got new hardware, moved the servers abroad and used recent backups. So the only bad side-effect of this police raid is that hundreds of clients of the ISP PRQ still have not got their servers back from the police. When the police did the raid on Wednesday, they took Pirate Bay from Bankgirot's secure server room. Then they also took all the servers in PRQ colocation facility STH3, effectively disabling a lot of small companies. The connection between PRQ and TPB? - Same owners, nothing more, this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row."
Looks like the Swedish Police is making a free, wide and very positive campaign to favor the Piracy Party. I bet they will be getting a lot more votes thanks to this weird operation. Thank you Swedish police officers!
I can only hope this is causing a huge scandal s Sweden as stated by the article. Can any Swedish readers provides us a synopsis of some of the reports on tv and in the newspaper?
Remember that this is Sweden, not USA we talking about, in here the police doesn't have any more leeway when it comes to laws than normal citicens. (Ever so often we get to read about wich high up police officer got how big traffic tickets etc [the fines are based on income rather than being a fixed sum]).
So please try to remember that not every contry works the same as America (and I'm really happy that it's so, frankly America and the American mentality scares me.)
According to the Swedish news coverage, there is some legitimate doubts as to whether it was a legitimate investigation or not. Their laws don't make linking to infingements an illegality. As such, since The Pirate Bay didn't host anything that is illegal per Swedish law. Now, it gets even better than this. According to people over there the national police happen to keep whingeing about not having enough manpower, etc. to enforce problems like drug trafficing, etc. and little gets done about real problems- but they can muster 50(!) people to "bust" a place that doesn't do anything illegal per their laws as a result of pressure being put on them from MPAA and others in the US. It's my understanding that there's a lot of people pissed about it over there right now.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Oh come on ... the video from the surveillance cameras shows they took their sweet time checking out the server racks. They didn't have to take all the hardware they took (and who the fuck needs to wear camo on a raid of a server room anyway?).
The warrant was for seizing the servers hosting TPB; any seizure exceeding that was outside the scope of the warrant, and that's why they (the police and the minister of justice) are in the crapper - taking something that's outside the scope of the warrant is theft. That they covered the security cameras with garbage bags partway through just makes them look guiltier.
So - either:
- the police couldn't properly identify the hardware in question, in which case they were incompetent, and should have called in someone with more expertise, or
- they could, but over-reached.
- they purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to, hoping for a backlash against TPB for causing the inconvenience
Those are the only options. How much you want to bet it was #3, seeing as politicians and the **AA were involved? This is a very public cluster-fuck, and someone will have to pay, both politically and financially."(groundless searches, SLAP-style shutdowns, excessive destruction of property)"
Both groundless searches and excessive destruction of property would be possible in this case; there has been no attempt whatsoever of the parties to in any way hide what they're doing, there has been public debate on the issue, there have been court cases giving credible support to the idea that linking is not infringement, everything's been open and available. Even seizing the actual pirate bay servers might be excessive, there is no grounds to suspect any destruction or tampering with evidence would be done; the parties in question do not consider their content illegal.
Basically it reeks of intimidation. Anyone around you doing something the MPAA doesnt like? Never mind if it's illegal or not, better get them to stop, or _you_ will be targeted. Collective punishment without due process.
They even took DNA from the _legal counsel_. In a possible contributory IP infringement case?? What are they going to use that for? As it has no value as evidence whatsoever, one can only assume they're planning to place it on some other crimescene or hand it to foreign intelligence. I cant think of any reasonable reason to take it, so the conclusion has to be they have some unreasonable purpose.
This isnt justice. This is state-sponsored political terrorism.
The devil is in the details. In this case, "most of the western world" would probably disagree quite strongly on a) what constitutes infringement, b) how long works should be protected for and c) what the punishments should be.
For example, I doubt you'd find many people who think downloading a song that gets played ten times a day on free to air radio should be considered infringement. Similarly, you will probably not find a lot of sympathy for media companies claiming to be "suffering" from copyright infringement in the face of ever increasing profits and ever decreasing product quality.
Swedish police has more leeway in Sweden then in the US because we don't have any institution to audit them. In american police (at least judging from police movies, correct me if I am wrong) it is considered improper for somebody to investigate themselves and therefore there are special police units that investigates on the actions of policemen. Here in Sweden it is the same polices doing internal investigation as all other investigation.
Also when it comes to courts. In the US you have a right to be judged by your peers (in theory, atleast). In Sweden you have the right to be judged by your politicians - remember, those same people who apparently ordered the bust (which they had no right to do, as so many others have pointed out).
The Swedish legal system is a catch 22 when it comes to govermental responsibility. The police carries out the orders from the politicians, the police investigates itself if anyone complains that their actions were illegal and if that investigation shows something was not right the politicians get to judge whether it was right or not of the police to carry out their orders.
They are liable for any damages, including downtime for legal services. They have publicly confirmed that after the raid.
And most likely they will end up paying big time. Instead of just taking TPB's servers as the warrant allowed, they took all servers hosted by the same hosting provider . Most likely to make an (illegal) example, trying to make the hosting provider go bankrupt and instill fear in other hosting providers. About 200 legitimate businesses in Sweden are down right now because of this.